Calvert of Strathore eBook

The world seemed topsy-turvy. Strange ideas and
theories were being written and talked about.
Physical science had been revolutionized. People
suddenly discovered that what they had held all their
lives to be facts were entire misconceptions of the
truth. And, if they had been so mistaken about
the facts of physical science, might they not be equally
mistaken about theology, about law, about politics?
Everywhere was doubt and questioning. Revolution
was in the air. It was the fashion, and the young
French officers returned from the War of Independence
in the American colonies found themselves alike the
heroes of the common people and of the fashionable
world.

True to its nature, the nobility played with revolution
as it had played with everything from the beginning
of time. It played with reform, with suggestions
to abandon its privileges, its titles, with the freedom
of the newly born press, with the prerogatives of
the crown, with the tiers etat, with life, liberty,
and happiness. It was a dangerous game, and in
the danger lay its fascination. Society felt its
foundations shake, and the more insecure it felt itself
to be the more feverish seemed its desire to enjoy
life to the dregs, to seize upon that fleet-footed
Pleasure who ever kept ahead of her pursuers.
There was a constant succession of balls, dramatic
fetes, dinner-parties, of official entertainments
by the members of the diplomatic corps in this volcanic
year of 1789. The ministers of Louis’s court,
being at their wits’ end to know what was to
be done to allay the disturbances, were of the mind
that they could and would, at least, enjoy themselves.
The King having always been at his wits’ end
was not conscious of being in any unusual or dangerous
position. As short-sighted mentally as he was
physically, he saw in the popular excitement of the
times nothing to dread. Conscious of his own
good intentions toward his people, he saw nothing
in their ever-increasing demands but evidences of a
spirit of progress which he was the first to applaud.
Unmindful of the fact that “the most dangerous
moment for a bad government is the moment when it meddles
with reform,” he yielded everything. The
nobles, noting with bitterness his concessions to
the tiers etat, told themselves that the King had
abandoned them; the common people, suspicious and bewildered,
told themselves that their King was but deceiving
them. The King, informed of the hostile attitude
of the nobility and the ingratitude of the masses,
vacillated between his own generous impulses and the
despotic demands of the court party. By the King’s
weakness, more than by all else, were loosened the
foundations of that throne of France, already tottering
under its long-accumulated weight of injustice, of
mad extravagance, of dissoluteness, of bloody crime.

Nature herself seemed to be in league with the discontent
of the times. A long drouth in the summer, which
had made the poor harvests poorer still, was followed
by that famous winter of 1789—­that winter
of merciless, of unexampled, cold for France.
And in the heat of that long summer and in the cold
of that still longer winter, the storm gathered fast
which was to rise higher and higher until it should
beat upon the very throne itself, and all that was
left of honor and justice in France should perish
therein.